Ask PG: Why not show comment up and down vote count separately?

3 points·exit··1 comment

At the moment it's hard to distinguish evenly contentious comments from ones which receive few reactions.

Are you seeing comment karma totals at all? I see your account is old enough that you date back to before the current practice of not showing comment karma scores by default (except the scores of each participant's own comments are visible to that participant when logged in). So are you asking for a feature that would be visible to each participant, to see up and down votes on that participant's own comments?

The site founder, pg, asked for suggestions on how to "stave off decline of HN" in a thread he opened 233 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

He then announced an experiment with the current practice of not showing comment karma scores in general 224 days ago,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333

noting that he might change settings back and forth as the experiment continued. About two days later he opened a simple yes/no poll about the experiment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039

and 216 days ago he replied to a question with a preliminary report on how voting behavior has changed.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271

As I recall, and as I just tried to verify by using HN search, the site founder pg and most of the other high-karma, long-time users here are reasonably well pleased with the results of not showing comment scores except to the participant who posts each comment.

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